And Home Before Dark
by simplyprologue
Summary: They're both in the woods and he knows it, and Mac's in danger and Will never had a choice in choosing his sisters and his mother but he's pledged his life to MacKenzie and he's chosen to protect her and it means something, even if the simple platinum band was taken from him during inmate processing. (Spoilers for 3.04 and 3.05.)


**A/N:** This is what happens when you listen to the "Into the Woods" soundtrack several times in a row (seriously, "No One is Alone" and "Children Will Listen" are entirely to blame here) and then decide to combine all of your WIPs into one mega WIP. Posting before heading to bed tonight so that it can have a good 12+ hours before getting Jossed with "Oh Shenandoah" but hopefully not too too badly.

But what can one do?

Warnings for some graphic imagery regarding Mac's stabbing, allusions to John McAvoy and everything he entails, and death. Spoilers for 3.05 "Oh Shenandoah," including a (mostly confirmed) character death. Thanks to Pippa for reading it over for me!

* * *

><p>He spent his childhood combing the woods surrounding the farm, the trees that connected their land to their neighbors and got so dense and thick at some points that neither family particularly cared who owned it, and neither tended it. Into the woods, to avoid his father's temper and his mother's screams, to hide his sisters and wait it out and only return to the tiny four-room farmhouse once the sun began to set.<p>

Always home before dark.

Will doesn't know why he's thinking about that, lying on his back on the stiff mattress provided by the Manhattan Detention Complex. He left Nebraska at the age of nineteen and never went into the woods again.

His cell is dimly lit.

The lights never go out entirely here—Manhattan, and inside the prison.

It's not like he never got lost in them, or stayed out past when the only light to guide him home were the stars twinkling overhead. Fear was the bottle in Dad's hand, or his closed fist, the waver in his voice before he started yelling, not a wooded tract of land three miles square. Home was never enough to tether him to Nebraska, to living on a farm, to any of it.

Not very far uptown is a half-finished apartment—they were building a home as it built them—and now it continues to be built in his absence and Will wonders what that means.

Wonders if MacKenzie is asleep.

_There's no goddamn merit badge to throw yourself at something so hard you can't do you're not even recognizable to yourself by the end of it. I don't want that for—_

They both have nightmares.

He's never had them about the woods before.

But now he does, decades older and finally with a home to go to, with another family to protect. Running breathlessly, twigs snap under his feet as he looks for a way out, for her, for a sign that he's running in the right direction at all.

Once he's been running long enough he hears it—

Mac screams.

Then he's sprinting, going as quickly as his legs will carry him, muscles burning as he tries to keep pace. Mac screams, high-pitched and warbling and clearly in pain and he can't tell which direction he should be going. Mac screams and it echoes between the trees and the leaf-covered forest floor.

Will's not trying to get out of the woods.

They're both in the woods and he knows it, and Mac's in danger and Will never had a choice in choosing his sisters and his mother but he's pledged his life to MacKenzie and he's chosen to protect _her_ and it _means something, _even if the simple platinum band was taken from him during inmate processing.

He never finds Mac until after she's finished screaming.

And when he finally does, he finds her on the ground, limbs splayed at unnatural angles. With her eyes open wide, staring sightlessly up at the stars, her lips parted in shock. With a knife sticking out of her abdomen, her hands clutching at the bloodied handle.

With a strangled cry he falls to his knees.

And then he wakes up.

_Again. And again._

Staring at the ceiling (last week he joked to MacKenzie that his cell is no more cramped and despairing than his first apartment) he thinks about the things he hasn't told Mac that he's seen. The CNN internal affairs report on her stabbing, the wire reports from the riot in Islamabad, the two hundred casualties, her nearly among them.

The vaulted footage from their cameraman.

Jim carrying Mac out of the crowd, thick with people standing tall and angry like trees.

Will scrubs his hands over his face, ignoring his roommate's snuffling breathing as _he _sleeps peaceably enough.

But he hasn't slept since before he was led away from Mac, and even that night's sleep was secured through thoroughly athletic and desperate sex in the wake of Mac's confession (he doesn't know what's happening in her head at the best of times, it can seem, and he still has no idea what to think about Mac disappearing off to meet with their FBI's most-wanted source in person, on her own, if he's being over-protective or the right amount) that she knows exactly who the whistleblower is.

He thinks about that instead.

Anything, over Mac, unmoving and empty-eyed, her body the victim of the dark woods.

* * *

><p>He's panicking. And it's not like she isn't, turning over every moment of the past two weeks in her mind, desperately sifting through details for some reprieve, some way to change their places.<p>

Will's pacing the floor, barely looking at her, throwing out questions—

_When did you meet with her? Fuck, that's where you went during the party wasn't it? Where? Did anyone see you? That's where you disappeared to on Tuesday, wasn't it? Does Neal know that you know? Were you safe? Jesus Mac, I know you don't care about your personal safety, but please? Are you still in contact with her?_

—before shaking his head and waving her off with a stilted, "Don't answer that."

Biting her lip, she laces her fingers together, squeezing until her knuckles hurt. If only she could stop telling Will things without thinking them through, because the last time she did that ultimately she wound up three thousand miles away lying on her back in the middle of a riot with a six inch knife sticking out below her rib cage just thinking about she wanted nothing more than to _go home_. And this time it's Will leaving, to just a few miles downtown but to a federal _prison _which will be nothing more than institutionalized abuse and everything her father was and everything his father warned him he would be.

"I know what I'm doing. I had sources inside the Taliban," she says, warning him of the perils of telling her to stay safe once more.

Will finally stops pacing, looking at her like she's gone mad.

"Yeah, one of them _stabbed _you."

"Well, that was a bad run."

Allowing herself a good breath, something more than the shallow pants she's been thoughtlessly taking, she regroups, unclasps her hands, and stands.

"Mac—"

"I'm not going to leave you in there to rot!" she snaps.

They're barely looking at each other, so Mac takes the opportunity to brush a piece of lint off her sleeve while watching Will's hands swing restlessly at his sides.

"So you're going to meet with her again?" he asks in a way that expresses his hope that she'll answer in the negative.

She knows she could lie, give him the peace of mind that while he's in prison that she'll be safe and tucked away but honestly _screw that _because for twenty-six months he lived with the fact that she was reporting from war zones and green zones and red zones and now he'll have to live with the fact that she's going after their source.

If she told him about the meet in the park in the pouring rain with the meter on her taxi still running, on being cornered at the correspondent's dinner after party, how she threatened Lilly without a second thought—

Will has seen the scar from the stab wound.

He knows _exactly _how far she'll go.

Now he needs to understand how far she'll go for him.

"Mac?"

She won't give him confirmation.

Ignoring the tears that rise, she grapples with her frustration and what Reese said to her earlier until it sets her face in determination. "I didn't see you for three years and it _nearly killed me. _I don't like the person I become when I'm not around you," she says first, and then quickly moving on because what happens to her tomorrow is not important. "And beyond that, how about the point of fact that I love you and I don't want you stuck in prison. It's not a fucking merit badge! Yes, I have been _shot at,_ I have been _stabbed._ I have been _tear-gassed,_ too—"

This is deeply unfair.

She shouldn't be doing this to him, and she knows it when she sees the panic heightening even further on his face.

"Mac—"

Not that she actually _stops_, instead throwing herself into another vein of argument, feeling something as sticky and cold as panic creeping up her spine.

"There's no goddamn merit badge to throw yourself at something so hard you can't do you're not even recognizable to yourself by the end of it." Because these situations aren't about who you are, but who you become and she knows they've both been that lost in it before. "I don't want that for—so_ fuck you _I'm going to do what I have to do to make the source put _her _fucking neck on the chopping block and I don't care what I have to do to get it done because I love you and you're getting out of there."

Her eyes are cast to the floor for the entirety of her voice-trembling monologue (she usually leaves this to Will, but he's been faltering on the inspiring speeches lately but then again she's not exactly being _inspiring _right now, either) so Mac misses the way his shoulders loosen, his slow approach, until she's finished speaking and looks up to gauge his reaction and less than a second later his mouth is on hers.

And then his hands are at her hips, pulling her against him, and she'd complain except that they were going to get here eventually anyway and if they do any more talking tonight who knows how they might incriminate themselves?

"Bed?" she murmurs in the breath that dictates a pause in their kiss.

He nips at her bottom lip, eyes half-lidded and downcast. Watching her. Do what, she doesn't know.

"I love you."

Beyond that, his answer is to slide his tongue into her mouth.

Stumbling around the construction materials they make their way to what will eventually become their master bedroom, furnished with something more than a mattress and boxspring and their luggage. She's still half in her cardigan by the time Will pushes her down onto the bed, helping her out of her pants.

* * *

><p>By the time Mac comes to visit again (Wednesdays, always Wednesdays for Mac and Rebecca comes on Mondays, Charlie comes on the Fridays that he can) he hasn't slept in days. He'd rather stare endlessly at the ceiling, driven half-mad by the sink in the cell eternally dripping at some off-beat meter, rather do <em>anything <em>than see Mac dead.

(Again.)

"You look dreadful," is how she greets him, her brows furrowing together as she sits in the hard plastic chair opposite the glass separating him.

Not that he can hear her.

(Ten years in the anchor chair means that through spotty live feeds and shaky signals he's become more than adequate at lip-reading.)

Rolling his eyes, he taps on the black phone pressed to his own ear, indicating that she needs to pick up the one on her side. Mac tends to forget, usually spun half into rant about some inane topic or other by the time she's arrived at this part of the detention complex.

Glaring (in the way that he knows she doesn't mean it) she picks up the phone and, with a degree of showmanship, puts it to her ear.

"I _said_, you look dreadful," she repeats. "Honey." Then her face softens. "How are you?"

"Doing a lot of reading."

(It's not a lie.)

Mac looks at him, of course, like she wants to press the issue farther, call him out on deflecting, but Will's certain that if he posed the question to her she'd do nothing less so she won't make him give her a real answer.

It doesn't look like she's been sleeping either.

But seeing her whole and alive is more than enough, even if her eyes are stamped with deep purple rings and she's paler than she was two months ago. Fluorescent light does no one favors, but her makeup is done and her hair is combed and curled and her clothes neat, so at least on some level she's taking care of herself.

He'd gotten so used to being able to see her twenty-four hours a day, to walk into her office or look across the bullpen or roll over in bed and she'd just _be there _even if she was working, or not paying attention, or asleep. Now there's inch-thick bulletproof glass between them and all Will wants in the world is to be able to brush his fingers down her arm.

Now she's rambling, and if he wasn't so exhausted he would be listening to more than just every third word and half of her phrases, he promises.

Mac is alive. She's safe, sitting here in front of him even if he can't reach her, and she's twirling the curled black telephone cord around her index finger and for a good thirty seconds Will wonders what Mac was like as a teenager, held hostage to the kitchen phone or if her parents let her have one in her room when she wasn't at boarding school.

Until something she says forces his whole attention to what she's saying.

"Wait, what—"

She stops talking, puzzled. "What?"

He's not _that _exhausted; he knows what he heard.

"You just said—"

Her eyebrows quirk towards her bangs. "Said what?"

"MacKenzie."

_I know what you're doing. _

"All I said," she carefully begins, looking more at her hands in her lap than at him. "All I said is that Neal and I think that we've found a solution for our… problem. Or we're going to try, anyway. You know I can't say more than that."

An onslaught of questions perch on the tip of his tongue, but she's right. This conversation is being recorded and even if they have spousal privilege, if the FBI thinks Mac knows who the source is then he doesn't want to imagine (Will does anyway, of course, because that's how his mind works) what they'll do to leverage the name out of her.

Or him.

It takes too much concentration to keep his breathing under control, and he'd greatly enjoy being up to flip a table, but this one is bolted to the floor.

"Oh god."

"I can handle this," Mac assures him, smiling crookedly and sadly. Smile faltering she untangles her finger from the phone cord and presses her palm flat against the glass. "You know that I can."

He's always been of the opinion that Mac is capable of anything that she sets her mind to, which is what's worrying him at the moment.

"I'm more worried about your irreverence to consequences. I kind of have a vested interest in your wellbeing."

If nothing else, Will understands how learning how high your pain tolerance teaches you to believe you can endure anything, just so long as it doesn't kill you. He figures that years of being thrown into walls and doors and brawling with your grown father dulls your nerves just as aptly as twenty-six months in active combat zones.

_Yes, I have been shot at, I have been stabbed. I have been tear-gassed, too—_

Will also understands how incredibly hypocritical he's being.

Mac scowls, all softness gone. "The waiting game is getting tedious and at this point we're just playing a high-stakes game of chicken with Lasenthal and Cedarman and I'm not willing to bet our future on it. You've been in here for two months this Friday, Will, I think we can all agree that _everyone_ thinks that you're a hardcore journalist—"

"Do you think—do you think that this is about vanity?" he asks, dropping his voice low, keeping it controlled with a calm he barely even feels.

MacKenzie can't possibly think…

"Do you think I'm any more impressed with our source than you are? But you're not going to budge, and neither is the DoJ," she says, soft again.

Swallowing, she bites her lip, her fingers sliding down the glass, and he presses his hand against her palm to keep her from putting her hand back onto the table.

"I'm worried about you," she murmurs.

His answer is deliberately deadpan. "Because I look dreadful."

"Because I _know you_, Billy and I don't care how many weeks in a row you joke about how khaki isn't your color I know you aren't sleeping and I know you aren't eating and you're probably having nicotine fits and I've seen enough movies to know the FBI has someone planted in here to make your life hell so you'll talk."

Face impassive, he tries not to let her know how correct she is. It would only encourage her to be more reckless.

MacKenzie smiles anyway. "So I figure I should spring my prince from his tower."

"I don't need to be saved."

It's a jarring dissonance, and he has no means to explain that often enough he finds her broken body suspended in the trees he used to climb as a boy, in the branches that used to give him sanctuary from his father—like a sacrifice to a carnivorous god.

Face hardening, she stares at their hands, and his, so much larger than hers.

"Isn't it time someone did?" she asks pointedly, still looking at his fingers.

Stomach clenching, all he can see is the knife in her belly, blood in the leaves, the whites of her eyes. He'd rather spend the rest of his time in prison to know that she risked her life, lost her life, for his freedom. And if Lilly Hart, who is paranoid and unyielding and being tracked down by several federal agencies and _so goddamn convinced that she is in the right_ is willing to meet with them after they didn't run the story, Will doesn't want to think about what she wants.

But maybe the lack of sleep is just making him paranoid too.

"Tell me you'll be careful," he says, realizing his voice has taken a turn towards pleading.

Not that she answers, still staring intently at their fingers.

"MacKenzie."

Sighing, she shrugs and when she looks at him at last her eyes are hemmed with tears.

"You know I won't do that."

His own eyes fluttering closed, he asks her to change the subject.

With his eyes screwed shut, he can almost imagine that Mac's voice coming through the phone is the same as her voice coming from inside the control room.

* * *

><p>The metaphor isn't lost on her; she's deep in the woods face-to-face with one of its horrors while Will is stuck in his tower, which previously was what could fit in the shot behind the anchor desk, but has now turned into a cell in the Manhattan Detention Complex, while she runs herself ragged every which way trying to convince their source—Lilly Hart, who MacKenzie <em>did<em> verify in the BCD employee directory and whose name is on at least a hundred of the thousands of documents she gave them—to put her name on the record.

Mac understands the metaphor. It just doesn't explain how it's come to grappling for the gun in Lilly's hand.

Deliberately not following in Snowden's example, Lily hasn't left the country, still working at BCD and suspected by neither her employers nor the FBI. Not that Mac was entirely convinced of Lilly's assertion that she'd gotten away with espionage without anyone so much as looking at her hard drive, but she wasn't about to pass up on the opportunity to meet with her face-to-face.

She brought Neal with her to the hotel in New Jersey where Lilly is staying for the weekend.

And craning her head to look at her watch, she knows she has two minutes before he knocks on the door like she told him to.

Less, if Lilly gets a shot off.

Her hands are sweating and Lilly has her finger on the trigger. MacKenzie retraces the moves she made to put herself here, _again,_ fighting with someone so she doesn't wind up with a belly full of shredded organs and blood. She's hours from getting her husband released from prison; she would really like to not die.

But this was her play, and now she has to see it to its end.

A scream building in her chest she brings the gun over their heads, pointing it at the ceiling before kicking out Lilly's leg, sending them both toppling to the floor at the foot of the bed. Her pulse roaring in her ears, it takes every inch of determination that she has to keep her arms rigid, fighting for breath as Lilly raises her knee and brings it into her stomach again, and again, and again.

Sucking in a deep gasp of air, Mac tries to pin Lilly to the carpet but finds herself overpowered, her head knocking against the cheaply-made rug and her grip faltering. But even the massive amounts of adrenaline in her system can't keep Lilly from bringing her hands on the gun to the floor over and over, attempting to break Mac's grip from the grip. Tears burning through her vision she tries to break from where Lilly's knees are now pinned around her hips, desperately ignoring the pain in her knuckles—

When the gun misfires.

Crying out, Lilly's grip slackens for half a moment, just long enough for Mac to ball her left hand into a weak fist and scrape her engagement ring—large, gaudy, and finally good for a practical purpose—across Lilly's face with a poorly-aimed punch.

It's enough.

Her mind processing everything in tiny increments, measured steps and moves and countermoves, Mac leverages Lilly off her, gaining possession of the Glock and rolling onto her hands and knees. Muscles protesting, she bounds to her feet and, shaking, nearly trips over her own feet as she backs herself up against the wall, the gun pointed at their whistleblower the entire time.

"It really didn't have to go this way," Mac stutters, eyes flickering between the Glock and the cut on Lilly's cheekbone, the blood on the diamond of her ring and the laceration left behind by the misfire. "I can't help you now."

Lilly looks at her hard, unmoved but clearly a woman who has run out of options.

"I could lose everything," she pants, after a long moment.

Mac shakes her head, nearly laughing.

"So could I."

It seems as if Lilly is concerned with little more than her own conscience, all things considered. Although considering that the last time she saw her, she was threatening to quit her job and turn her in… well it's not entirely a _surprise_ that Lilly brought a gun.

"I wouldn't have killed you," she says, half-indignant.

Mac does laugh, shocked, ignoring the thick rivulet of blood she feels leaking out from her hairline. It doesn't hurt, not yet anyway. She must have gotten burned by the flash when the gun went off, but with her thoughts racing she can't force them to settle long enough on that for long enough to make it real.

"My husband's in jail. For you."

"For Neal," Lilly scowls. "God, don't act like—"

"Someone was going to go down for _you _no matter what."

Crossing her arms like a petulant child, Lilly moves to sit with her back against the opposite wall. "Like nothing I gave you wasn't a journalist's wet dream. I chose you all for a reason, _News Night _and its staff of young do-gooders in love with justice."

She's definitely dizzy, and cold, and all her thoughts suspend in place and then hit all at once when someone knocks frantically on the door.

"Mac? I heard—are you okay?"

Neal. Who was told to remain in the rental car, and if he did that and could hear the gun go off from there, she needs to get out of here.

"Don't say anything," she tells Lilly, keeping the gun pointed at her but crossing the motel room to the bed and picking up the corner of the sheet and wiping off the handle before dropping it on the pillow. "Here is what's going to happen. You are going to book the first flight to a country that will let you apply for asylum. Russia. Venezuela. Ecuador. You have twelve hours. And then I'm going to hand this over to the FBI. Once I have confirmation that you've left the country, ACN will run _your_ story, releasing your name and your involvement because I'm sure the FBI will be releasing your name to every database in the _world_, and then I never want to hear from you ever again. Got it?"

Pulling her knees up to her chest, Lilly nods.

Mac leaves before Neal can knock on the door again, waking up god knows how many of the inhabitants of the rooms surrounding them.

It's not until they're back in the car that Neal curses, gaping somewhere near her hairline, and she pulls down the visor to look at the mirror. Then she gapes too, wondering how the _fuck _she's going to hide a three inch gash (that's not quite _gushing _blood but it's definitely _seeping _at an alarming rate, matting her bangs to her forehead) of all things.

Grasping for some tissues in her purse to press to the laceration she tells Neal to drive off.

This one is going to leave a scar.

* * *

><p>After, he lies between her legs with his head pillowed on her stomach, tracing his fingers over the stab wound on her stomach.<p>

Her thighs are still twitching, twenty minutes after.

In less than twelve hours, he'll be in contempt of court. And then depending on how charitable Cedarman feels like being, in prison shortly after that for anywhere between ten days and six months, if Molly's prediction holds true.

"You can't tell _anyone_."

With his luck, she'll try to bluff the FBI again except this time it won't be a bluff. It'll be like how she begged him to fire her over Genoa, saying anything and everything she had to to get him to fire her on Election Night, and she'll wind up in jail just because she thinks it's her place.

"I know."

"I mean it."

Lifting her head off her pillow, she looks down her abdomen at him.

"I _know._"

Exhaling heavily (he's going to jail tomorrow—today, really—and he needs to know that MacKenzie won't be putting herself into harm's way) he crawls up her body, pausing to soothe a bite mark he left on the side of her breast at her behest.

Her breasts, the insides of her thighs, he's fairly certain that he's left a hickey stranded on her hip. But she had asked him to mark her, and he'd never do it somewhere besides the two of them would see, and he wonders if Mac wants to be able to make sure that this was real once he's put in handcuffs.

Forearms framing her face, he kisses her again.

Softly, barely a kiss at all.

When he pulls back she's blinking sleepily up at him.

"If I'm going to stay sane in there, I'm going to need that you're safe out here," Will says, rolling onto his side next to her, wrapping his arms around her and burying his face in her hair.

She wasn't wrong.

He is scared.

But the ring on her finger, their new home, going to work every day back to the night three years ago he told her that he was all in—it was about _this. _He's chosen where to be, just like Mac chose to come back and fight after CNN tossed her on her ass for having PTSD.

He's a journalist.

Now it's time to prove it.

Terrified though he is, that's what he reminds himself of as he falls asleep tangled up with her.

* * *

><p>"We can't go to the ER," Mac tells Neal, over and over, until he finally parks the rental in a garage a block from the AWM building, and in under an hour the senior staff is crowded into the conference room as Jim applies butterfly stitches and gauze to her forehead like he was taught to five years ago in a USMC first aid seminar.<p>

(They go to the hospital and the nurse will know it's from a gunshot and then police will be called and if they swab her hands she knows there'll be gunshot residue and whatever she holds in her heart for Lilly she made her a promise of twelve hours and twelve hours Lilly will _get_.

No hospital.)

Someone hands her coffee and a bagel and eventually her head stops spinning long enough for just how _angry _Charlie is to register. Rebecca is called in shortly after that, and before the morning is over the FBI knows a deal for the source's identity is on the table and paperwork for Will's release is being processed, contingent upon Lilly releasing her identity as the leak over the BCD email system exactly five minutes after her flight to Argentina lands.

And for once, everything goes planned.

Until thirty minutes before Will is due to be released, Charlie collapses in the bullpen.

Fidgeting, she stands in the parking lot of the Manhattan Detention Complex, pulling on the sleeves of her jacket for warmth. As soon as Charlie was in the ambulance she took a taxi here, frantically looking into the compact mirror from her purse, fixing her hair over the cut at her hairline on the ride downtown.

Her BlackBerry hasn't rung yet.

Don and Sloan said they would call as soon as they had an update on Charlie.

Mac's checking her BlackBerry again when the doors to the prison complex open and she sees Will's silhouette appear in the doorway. For a brief moment she feels nothing but relief, dropping her purse and her phone into the back seat of the taxi she'd order to idle while she waited.

And then she runs into his arms.

* * *

><p>Rebecca had warned him of what had happened. First in a very broad retelling as he redressed into his street clothes, and then the details, once he demanded them.<p>

And then he punched a cinderblock wall.

"What the fuck were you thinking?" he asks, half angry and half wondrous, winding his arms around her so tightly that he lifts her off her feet. "Christ, Mac. You're lucky this is a sentimental moment otherwise I would be kicking your ass so hard—"

He puts her down again, his hands sweeping upwards to her face, moving her hair out of the way (and then down her cheeks, her neck, all over her because he can touch her again, thank god, because his nightmares almost came true) and even in the dim light of the parking lot the laceration on forehead is swollen and painfully red.

Stroking her cheekbones with his thumbs, he bends to slant his mouth against hers. They're out of the woods. Not home before dark, the street lamps lit up above them and he's kissing her in golden light. But they're out of the woods and Mac is fine and—

_The way I heard it, Mac wrestled her for the gun. That's when it went off. She thinks it wasn't a graze, just the force of the flashbang. She doesn't appear to have a concussion, but the cut looks pretty nasty. She has a pretty bad burn, too. _

Something's wrong.

He pulls back when he realizes she's not kissing him back.

"What, Mac?"

* * *

><p>Twenty minutes later, they arrive at Mt. Sinai-Roosevelt. Before they can even enter the ER, Don and Sloan come out and tell them.<p>

Charlie's dead.

When Will sways on his feet, she braces herself against his side to keep him standing up. Shock grips his features, before the devastation, and once more Will doesn't have the chance to say goodbye to his father and there are half a dozen platitudes waiting in the back of throat, about how Charlie knew he loves him, Charlie loved him very much, Charlie didn't need to hear anything from him—

"I want to see him," Will finally does rasp.

Head snapping up, Don nods. "We're waiting for Nancy to come—she hasn't to—not yet. He's still in the trauma bay."

Sliding her hand into his, squeezing his limp fingers tightly, she tugs Will forward, to follow Don into the hospital.

Will barely pays attention to the furnishings of the home that Mac finished while he was in prison, trying to get her out of her clothes as he steers them to their bedroom.

* * *

><p>Under the harsh hospital lights, as they stood over Charlie's body (he'd held his hand, nervelessly, while Mac stooped to brush her hair off his forehead, whispering her thanks before kissing his cheek) the full expanse of the burn on her face became apparent and he'd nearly gotten sick to his stomach as she stood, murmuring something about the impossible dream and hearts striving upwards. Everything, <em>everything<em>, in his life has been upended and is not recognizable at all.

He's just spent almost nine weeks in prison.

Lucas Pruitt wants to change everything they've worked for.

Mac is small and shaking and half her head is a bruise.

_Charlie is dead. _

Something has to be real, and solid, and it's not until Mac is grinding herself down into his lap, her head thrown back and the valley between her breasts beaded with sweat that it does. He flips them, hiding his face in her neck as the tears come. The way she shakes with orgasm, clenching down around him, the way he follows her quickly—it's enough to keep them in comfort for a short while.

They're still left staring at the ceiling afterwards.

"Was he—?"

Mac swallows hard, still panting. "He was more irritable, but he wasn't—not until right before he—right in the middle of the newsroom. Then when he was put onto the ambulance he was still awake, and the paramedics were stabilizing him, but his liver was so far gone and he wasn't a good transplant candidate and so—"

Even with all the lamps off (they never bothered to turn them on at all, simply tumbled down onto the bed and under the sheets) there's enough ambient light from the city that he can see every corner of their finished master bedroom.

"It doesn't make sense."

"I know," Mac whispers, seeking for his hand under the covers and turning onto her side, facing him.

He brushes the fingers on the hand not in hers over the tender skin at her hairline. "What the fuck happened about no more merit badges?"

Biting her lip, she shrugs.

"I wanted to save you," she whispers.

Sighing, he closes his eyes rather than react. "I almost—you almost—you could have been killed."

"Only almost," she breathes.

Her following giggle is watery, the precursor to a sob. Opening his eyes, he pulls her into his arms.

Eventually, after long moonlit hours of watching Mac sleep he manages to drift off. He's going to take her to the doctor's tomorrow, he's decided. To make sure her head is alright.

(That's his last thought before, at last, exhaustion drags his eyes closed.)

When he opens them again, he's in the woods—dark and deep and dense and when he lifts his gaze to the horizon the sun is large on the horizon, hanging low in the sky. Heading back towards the path he keeps an eye out for MacKenzie, his ears prickling, waiting for her screams.

Instead, she joins her hand in his, smiling elusively.

Saying nothing.

He leads her out of the woods, and home, before dark.

Bracing himself, Will pushes open the back door to the farmhouse where he's never taken her in waking hours, nor in his dreams ever before. A pervasive calm takes over him, and it holds to no logic until he sees Charlie standing in the middle of the main room, lingering at his Dad's recliner.

And Charlie is smiling.

"You made it."

* * *

><p><strong>Thanks for reading!<strong>


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